Planning a food event involves meticulous attention to three particular areas—menu, location, and personnel. If you are just planning a meal, then what you eat is all that matters. If you are planning a food event, then who and where come into play. (It occurs to me just now that a chart would be helpful, perhaps.) The order in which these things are tackled is determined, not by the person who asks the first question, thereby calling the meeting to order, but by the person who answers the first question.
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?” is not a fair answer and is easily rebuffed by experienced food-event committee people. It is like learning to return a serve in tennis, though some people are better at it than others.
A first answer like “Stay in” indicates that the primary concern is location.
“We haven’t seen so-and-so in a while” leads directly to personnel.
“Something large” means the menu questions come first.
After many years as a standing member of the food-event committee, one learns what to listen for.
Are we going out this evening or are we staying in? is the first question. Did we miss the sunset last night because we were getting ready for dinner and so we might rather stay home? Or is it going to be rainy and we really would rather not be out in the weather this evening? How long has it been since we cooked together, just the two of us, laughing and telling stories and wondering out loud about the things we have been wondering to ourselves while we work around each other in the kitchen? Is there a full moon that makes it a good night to stay home and eat by candlelight beside the pool?
If we are going out, are we feeling social or antisocial? Do we feel like liming this evening? Liming is an island word that means hanging out with your friends, talking about the weather or sports or geopolitics or anything else that comes up. Or do we still want to go out but really want to go to a place where there is not much chance of running into conversation? A place where we can take our books or our cards or our dominoes and be only with each other?
If we are going out tonight, then do we want to go out at lunchtime as well? If we have this kind of food or that kind of food for lunch, will that change our dinner plans?
If we are staying in, what are we cooking and do we have everything we need or do we need to go to the market? Which brings the potential for eating out at lunchtime back into play, of course, since we have to go to town anyway. Which brings location and personnel back up for discussion.
And then, of course, in case we change our minds because the weather changes or we nap for too long, do we have some food in the house that will work for a backup plan?
You will notice that all of the dinner questions keep affecting the lunch plan as well. Which is particularly key on St. Cecilia. If you can get the food-event committee meeting to go your way, then you can get yourself downtown in Princetown around noon. According to minutes of the meeting, if there had been minutes, I would have been seen to be angling for fried chicken at the Heptagon, which is what I would be happy to do every day in St. Cecilia. What I am really angling for, I have come to realize, is a chance to be among the people in this new world of mine. And a chance to see if my place in it has changed at all.
The lunch hour in Princetown is crowded.
The schoolchildren are out for lunch, for one thing. We watch them parade up and down the streets in their uniforms. Each school has different colors, and the uniforms are neatly pressed and clean and shining in the sun. The children move in packs along the sidewalks and in the courtyards of the cafés and snackettes. They laugh and cut up the way children everywhere do. We love to watch them.
The sidewalks fill up with businesspeople and shopkeepers and government workers too. The men are in ties and polished shoes; the women are in skirts and high heels. They stroll elegantly and languidly to lunch and back.
There are the taxi drivers and the dockworkers and the others whose work requires less formal dress. The square is full of taxis and vans, and the sounds are of music from the cafés and of people shouting greetings across the street and into shop doorways. Car horns beep cheerfully, and the policeman at the square blows his whistle to direct the traffic.
St. Cecilia is a melting pot. I expect that is true of the other island nations in this part of the world, but I do not know for sure. Any crowd of people anywhere in St. Cecilia is liable to include people of all sorts of colors and origins. The population is primarily African in origin, but everywhere you go, you will find Europeans, East Indians, Asians, and Latin Americans as well.
Nowhere is the global village more apparent than at the Heptagon.
Essentially a lime bar with a one-room kitchen, the Heptagon is a small open-air restaurant that sits along the harbor in Princetown. Someone hung a wraparound porch along the harbor side and put three or four picnic tables in the front. There are a dozen or so stools at the counter and an open-air poolroom in a separate building a few feet away.
We go there for fried chicken and johnnycakes. They offer other things to eat, but we have not yet gotten past the fried chicken and the johnnycakes.
We order our food, and Jessica goes into the back. We then hear this wham, wham, wham sound made by a cleaver chopping our fried chicken into manageable chunks. We wait a little longer, and then when the food finally comes, we sit and eat and watch a fair portion of the world go by.
I am not really a lime bar kind of person.
Some of that, I like to think, has to do with a kind of innate sense of dignity, which, if you met me, you would discern right away. Okay, maybe it is a dignity I hope to have and I think I have from time to time. It could just be shyness and a lack of solid conversational skills.
The other reason I am not a local-hangout person is that when I was young, I was one of those people who got picked on, and I have made it a habit over the years to stay away from places that look as though the people might be rough in any way.
Also, I like my meals to be served on white tablecloths, and I like my fellow diners to be well dressed, and I like to be in places where people talk in hushed tones even when they are laughing and telling stories.
In my life in the States, there are only two exceptions.
One is the little neighborhood restaurant about eight blocks from our house. It is by no means a hangout sort of place—they make things with truffles sometimes, and they have wine tastings, and the staff is always dressed in black—but we know so many people there that making any appearance requires what is sometimes an overwhelming amount of conversation for a shy person.
The restaurant opened about the same time we moved into the neighborhood, and it has become the place where we meet our friends and neighbors most often. When we have to travel, we find ourselves going there the night before we leave and the night we return. Our world is a small one in some ways, and we have to check on it and make sure everyone is doing okay. We also have to hear someone say they will miss us before we go, and someone say they are glad we are back when we return. Both are guaranteed at the Mirror.
The other exception is Brown’s Diner, a small place about fifteen or twenty blocks away from our house, where I often have lunch. Brown’s has the best baseball talk I have ever heard and the best cheeseburgers on the planet, and if I do not have a certain amount of both each week, my well-being and my metabolism are affected in a negative way.
When I get to Brown’s, Terry says hello to me from behind the counter as I come in. He places my order without my saying anything more than hello in return. I even have a semi-assigned seat at the counter. The four guys on my left sit together every day, and so seat number five, if you count from left to right, is the one I am supposed to sit in. Number six belongs to Harold. Or Kathryn. Whichever one gets there first. Someone will ask me to move if I sit too far to the left or right, and lately they have been moving other folks—tourists is the name for those who come in less frequently than once a week—out of my seat when I come in. Every once in a while, it occurs to me that I could ac
tually be liming, which is kind of astonishing for a person as shy as I am.
It took a lot of trips to Brown’s before I got my assigned seat. But after about four or five trips to the Heptagon, I noticed that the regulars were moving around so Sara and I could have a seat at the counter.
What’s not to love about a place like that?
Sometimes when we are planning the day’s food events, we want island food.
We can wander into a snackette anywhere on the island to find saltfish and johnnycakes, a meal that holds the same place in the local cuisine as fish and chips do in Great Britain and a cheeseburger and fries do in the States. On Fridays there is goat water, a stew served nearly everywhere on the last workday of the week. The Water Department even throws a weekly Friday-evening goat-water party in town, a civilized public service if I ever heard of one. Although, I confess, I am not sure what goat water actually is and have been too shy to ask.
Barbecue pits are going in St. Cecilia almost around the clock—chicken and lamb and spare ribs. Seafood is to be found in plenty, of course, steamed or grilled, fresh off the boat as one would expect. And all manner of curries and salads and, my personal favorite, rice and peas. We know where to go to find these things if we want them.
Lately, though, when we want island food, we just call Mrs. Louvin.
A friend on the island told us about her. What she said was that if we wanted local cuisine without going out, we should just call Mrs. Louvin, and for a reasonable amount of money, she would cook what we wanted and bring it to our house.
So Sara called her one day, and they talked on the telephone for a while, figuring what we were going to have for dinner the next night and what time we were going to have it. When everything was settled, Sara hung up the telephone, and we went back to whatever we were doing.
In an hour or so, there was a knock at the door, and I went to the door, and a woman was there who said her name was Mrs. Louvin. I invited her in and called for Sara, and before I could stop it, conversation broke out all around me.
Mrs. Louvin had stopped by on her way home from work to meet the people she was going to cook for as well as to be sure that we had been properly welcomed into her village. Then she was going home to cook for her family. Tomorrow night she would cook for them and for us.
So she stayed for an hour, and she and Sara talked about all manner of things. The next night she came back with our dinner, all gathered up in the best china and serving things that she had, and she sat for a while and chatted before she left.
Mrs. Louvin made dinner for us twice that week. She also dropped by the day before we were to leave, and she and Sara talked for a while and then said good-bye to each other. They put their arms around each other, and there were tears in their eyes, and there were promises made about when we would all see each other again. Sara called her the next day on our way off the island and had tears in her eyes while she did so.
I suspect there are plenty of places no matter where you are that will deliver food. There are not many places that can deliver a food event.
From time to time on St. Cecilia, we decide we are in need of comfort food. Not that life there is so uncomfortable, of course, but we are southerners, after all, and our love for Italian cuisine and seafood and other interesting things notwithstanding, sometimes we need meat and potatoes. “Roast beast,” as Sara calls it, with potatoes and carrots and gravy. Or a good steak and maybe some french fries and a wedge of lettuce and blue cheese dressing and homemade ice cream for dessert. Somewhere on this island you can probably get good sweet tea, the house wine of the South, but we have not found it yet. (Our research will continue, of course.)
But we have found the place for the comfort meal. We always know it is time for such a meal when, during the food-event meeting, a committee member says, “Let’s go see David tonight.” When we go to see David, we know we are in for comfort food and for comfortable conversation to go with it.
Over the years we have learned that the best place to sit and eat in most restaurants, especially small neighborhood ones, is not at one of their best tables. It is at the counter or the bar or the little table closest to the kitchen door. That is where you find the regulars. If you sit at one of the “good” tables where the “guests” are seated, then the conversation is limited to whoever is at your table. Which can be a good thing, depending on what sort of event you had in mind to go with your food.
If you know where to sit, you are automatically included in every conversation within hearing distance. If you want to be private, you can get a table or stay at home. If you want to make friends, sit where the regulars sit.
Which is how we met David and why we go to see him.
David is in charge of where the regulars sit at the Galley Door on St. Cecilia. His bailiwick is a big open-air, circular bar attached to a house. The house is where the kitchen is, and the porch that connects the two is where the tables are. Over by David is where the regulars are. The whole business is only about twenty yards from the beach, looking over a sheltered cove that faces the sunset. The place has all manner of things nautical hanging from the rafters. It is the authentic version of the décor that a Red Lobster tries to do while being in a strip mall instead of being in the West Indies.
When we go to see David, we talk about mystery novels and sixties rock’n’roll music. We talk about how people live on St. Cecilia, and we get tips on where to find stuff that we are having trouble locating, like fresh lobster to cook at our house or the good coffee that comes from Puerto Rico or fresh coconut for the sunset-round snack tomorrow afternoon.
Sometimes David will introduce us to people who come in. Later he fills us in on who they are and what they do. Which is how we met Andrew, who is the chef at the Galley Door and who also runs the sailboat race that we had watched a few days before from the porch at Seastone.
We will ask David about another restaurant, and he will tell us whether or not the chef is good or bad or on vacation. It is where we found out the reason that Cassandra’s Café has been closed. It is where we found out which two hills to look between to see if the clouds off to the east are the kind that just pass over on the way to Mexico or are the ones that will bring rain in the next hour or so.
It is also where we go when we want someone to say that they are glad we are back. There is more to comfort food than just food.
One of the major food events whenever we are on St. Cecilia in the fall is a really fine dinner to celebrate our anniversary.
The first time, we called for a taxi and arranged for someone to take us way up into the mountain to an old plantation inn for the anniversary food event. We called for a taxi because we did not trust ourselves to find Sugar Rock Plantation up in the mountains in the dark. We knew better than to trust ourselves because we had already tried to find the place in the daylight and had no luck at all. A couple of times we thought we could see it across the way, but we could not pick out the right little lane to get to it. I believe the reason there are not many road signs on St. Cecilia is that the taxi drivers have taken them all down as part of their ongoing marketing strategy.
The anniversary dinner was everything we had hoped for. Starting with hors d’oeuvres served on silver trays in the great room while the soft music played and the fans whirled overhead as we waited for the seven-o’clock seating. The chef himself came out to talk with us about the menu and help us make our choices before it was time for dinner. There was linen and lace and silk and pearls and jackets and ties. There were white tablecloths and fresh flowers and sparkling candlelight and a view down the hill into the bay below. At first we could see the faint light of the setting sun way off on the horizon and then later the moon coming up.
And, of course, we had a table just for two and only two. If you believe that more than two persons are required to turn supper into an event, then you need more than just a remedial course in food-event planning.
The next spring when we were down on St. Cecilia, the children an
d my mother and my aunt were with us. We got tired of trying to describe St. Cecilia, so we just brought them along. We took my mother and my aunt to Hamilton Plantation to have lunch. It was not our anniversary, of course, but we considered it to be research for our next anniversary. There was some feeling that to try to repeat what had been such a splendid event the previous year might be impossible. As it turned out, we did not like it as well.
So the next fall we went to the Inn at Tower Hill to celebrate our anniversary. It was closer to Seastone and easier to find, so we drove this time, feeling adventurous.
We arrived early and went to sit on the veranda for a few moments before dinner. The veranda had been glassed in, with air conditioning, the first air conditioning we had come across in days. It was a quiet night at the inn, or so it seemed, and so the veranda was quiet too. A man who seemed familiar headed in the direction of the little group of couches where we had collapsed into the comfort of the thick cushions and the suddenly astonishing cool air. Usually you have to go to the ATM kiosk downtown to find air conditioning.
“How are you this evening?” he said. “I am glad to see you again. Welcome back.” Which seemed an odd thing to say since we had never actually been to the Inn at Tower Hill before. We assumed he had confused us with a couple of movie stars.
“How is your mother doing? And your aunt?” he said.
This is a small town that just happens to take up an entire island in the Caribbean. It took a minute for the three of us to put it all together, but it turned out that James had been our waiter at Sugar Rock for our first anniversary dinner. He had been our waiter the day we had lunch with my mother and my aunt at Hamilton Plantation. And now here he was in front of us again, at Tower Hill. I began to wonder if I was under surveillance by the Ministry of Tourism for some reason.
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